With the opening line, “Thou youngest virgin-daughter of the skies,” Dryden situates the overarching theme of innocence in his ode to the untimely passing of a beautiful young woman and promising poet. Her early death prompts wonder as to the whereabouts of her soul: a distant planet or a place among the angels? The transmigration of the soul after death is paralleled with the idea that the poetic soul of her father—a writer of tragic drama—was infused into her at birth.
Dryden suggests not only this connection to a previous poetic soul, but continues his minor theme of the migratory nature of such an abstraction with consideration of the idea that not only did Killigrew inherit the soul of Greek poetess Sappho, but that she actually was Sappho. The connection between the natural artistry of Sappho’s poetry un-corrupted by artifice connects with references to celestial music of the spheres and the myth of bees clustering on the lips of Pindar to foretell the coming of a great poet to set the stage for what is the most controversial line in the poem.
“Art she had none, yet wanted none”
Some view this as a critique of Killigrew’s talent, but in the context of the images of innocence which dominate the poem—from vestal virgins to Killigrew’s own pastoral paintings—the ambiguity of the word “art” becomes clears: Killigrew had no artifice in her poetry or her life. The distinction clearly drawn that her verse is noble and her bosom moral traces a trajectory straight from the seeming criticism to the explication of meaning. This explication is punctuated by the opening line of the stanza which follows in which Dryden asserts that Killigrew would have been right at home among the Nine muses of the Arts.
This leads into a long appreciation of Killigrew’s talents as a landscape painter before drawing a symbolic comparison of Killigrew’s unique qualities through association with the mythical Phoenix which leads to a more concrete pairing with another young poet who fell victim to smallpox, Katherine Philips. Through this connection, Dryden works together concluding his poem with a reiteration of opening idea of souls migrating to the heavens after death leaving their memory to become a metaphor for the innocence and goodness that allows those souls to twinkle in the stars at night.
